Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2) Read online

  I plunged off the path and scrambled over a fallen tree and a jumble of rocks, till I found a tiny clearing I remembered from my time as a student. The midday sun, being directly overhead, reached the rough circle of grass and rock, and the air smelled of pine and damp earth. I sat down, pulling a nutrition bar and a bottle of water out of my pocket dimension, and eating as I took the opportunity of silence and solitude to think.

  Except that my brain refused to settle on any one line of thought. It skipped from questions about who the current mediators of the Galactic Court were, which ones worked on secret projects, how the AIs interfaced with them, how Ahab felt about the possibility of full recognition of his people as a species, whether people would try to kill me for exercising the full extent of my talent (or what they believed to be its full extent), and at what point my lingering sense of loyalty to the Academy would end? The Academy’s research shamans hadn’t told me anything useful about Vulf’s shift from man to robot wolf and back, and without that personal incentive of learning from them for Vulf’s sake, the question of me staying on was mine alone.

  By the time I returned to the conference room, I’d worked myself into a greater state of agitation and indecision than when I’d sneaked out of it.

  Perhaps if the very important people at the meeting had bothered to imagine themselves in my shoes they wouldn’t have made the drastic mistake they committed when the meeting resumed.

  Winona broke from protocol for one sotto voce comment. “Jaya, you should have attended the lunch, not slipped away.”

  As it was, I sat dumbstruck as I listened to the decision the leaders of interstellar humanity had made in my absence, concerning me.

  “For Ms. Romanov’s protection.” President Hoffer was their spokesperson. “A bodyguard shall accompany her at all times. It is our condition for her acceptance of the role as Shaman Justice.”

  “I haven’t decided whether I’ll be a Shaman Justice,” I blurted out.

  “Of course you will. You have no choice, girl,” Phillip Song, President of Planet Gemini, said.

  No choice?

  President Hoffer beckoned his two bodyguards forward from their position by the door.

  Both produced disrupters from inside their jackets.

  The other three shamans in the room flinched, although Winona looked angry as well as resigned. I glanced at her. Of them all, she alone knew, because I’d told her, along with the Meitj Emperor, that I could destroy a disrupter. She didn’t know that at the time I’d done so I’d been significantly calmer and not racing bullies’ trigger fingers. Nonetheless, she shook her head fractionally.

  Message received. Now was not the time, in her view, to reveal that aspect of my abilities.

  Humanity’s elected leaders had decided that my “bodyguards” were to be my prison guards. In their minds, I was an asset to be controlled.

  Their short-sighted self-satisfaction baffled me. If I agreed to become a Shaman Justice, the leaders of humanity could posture all they wanted about “protecting” me. The Galactic Court would never let guards with conflicting loyalties accompany me on my missions. Alex’s revelations of this morning made that clear. But even without the Galactic Court acting, did the leaders expect that I and other shamans would submit to them?

  And if you don’t, a small voice whispered in my mind. President Hoffer warned you about this yesterday?

  What? He did?

  Are you human or are you other? that annoying small voice that was also me recalled President Hoffer’s threat.

  What I did now, how I responded to the leaders’ escalation to control me with the threat of force, would have implications for all shamans’ relationships with their wider communities. Were shamans part of humanity or separate?

  Fortunately, the presidential bodyguards weren’t accustomed to dealing with shamans, or perhaps they underestimated me.

  Vulf would have run the disrupter as soon as the threat to control me via it was made. That the two bodyguards chose to posture rather than act was my opportunity.

  I sent out two concentrated lashes of sha energy and the disrupters tore from the bodyguards’ hands and flew to mine.

  “If I was easy to control, the Galactic Court wouldn’t want me,” I said. Then I vanished.

  I employed the same sha bubble of invisibility that I’d used to escape at lunch, but this time everyone in the room noticed me vanishing.

  The result was uproar.

  The bodyguards hesitated. I might have taken their disrupters, but they still had blasters. However, firing blasters in a conference room filled with heads of state would result in a swift ride to the unemployment office.

  I took the few seconds advantage I had and jumped out the window. This time, instead of heading for the forest, I kept the sha bubble around me and ran east-north-east. The Academy’s sports grounds gave way to fields, and then, to open pasture.

  Any trained shaman would have been able to track the sha energy flaring from my bubble of invisibility. It reshaped light to hide me from physical sight, but in terms of sha energy, it was a metaphorical spotlight. If any shamans were tracking me—and I wouldn’t put it past Alex as a Shaman Justice—they would have to wonder what I intended. There was nothing in front of me.

  A farmhouse occupied the north side of the next valley, but I didn’t head for it. A rock shifted under my left boot. I went down on one knee, dropping the disrupters. I didn’t bother picking them back up. I could feel my destination.

  A few weeks ago aboard Vulf’s starship, the Orion, I’d told him and Ahab that I had a portal set up on San Juan, near the Academy. Until Ivan had used a portal to escape us, and Vulf had asked if I had any portals established through the galaxy, I’d forgotten its existence. I’d created it as a training exercise when I was a student. Portals took a substantial amount of sha energy to create, but once in place, they remained in existence for decades, possibly longer. A shaman created a portal coded to his or her energy signature. Then, when needed, a portal could be opened instantly.

  Portals were one-shot, instantaneous transport across space. Even better for my purposes, it was nigh on impossible to determine where one had led. In effect, they self-destructed after use.

  It wasn’t that I remembered the rock formation, an odd five-sided hollow, in which my portal lay dormant so much as that the portal’s subtle sha energy pattern called to me. I jumped into the hollow, concentrated on the exit location I required, and activated the portal.

  In the absence of any clear notion of what I wanted to do, I opted to run away.

  Chapter 3

  The portal opened in a narrow country lane outside a modest wooden gate. A goat regarded me with great curiosity from high in the branches of a chestnut tree. It nibbled a leaf, then maa-aaa’d at me.

  I stared at it as I panted, trying to catch my breath after the cross-country run followed by me hurtling through the portal. The air smelled of spring wildflowers and although I had no idea which direction was which, the angle of the sun and something in the soft quality of it suggested mid-afternoon. There was a lazy sound of bees in the flowering hedgerow and the chirps and song of many birds.

  Apparently, I’d portalled into a bucolic idyll. There was even a family of ducks, the parents white and grey, the ducklings yellow balls of fluff, waddling near a sky-blue pond.

  A wooden farmhouse with a gray shingled roof and bright red door stood on a slight rise. A barn and smaller sheds peeped out from behind it. Two horses stood in a side yard. When the goat bleated again, and leapt to the ground, the horses ignored it, continuing to graze.

  I didn’t have the option of ignoring the goat. It frisked toward me.

  Lessons in animal husbandry had not been my favorite as a student shaman, but I knew enough to recognize the goat as a youngster. It was curious rather than aggressive, so I let it approach, sniff my hand, and gently butt my hip.

  “No,” a female voice ordered from behind me.

  The goat retreated with a
guilty toss of its head.

  “We’re trying to teach her to be gentle. What is cute in a kid is trouble in an adult.” The middle-aged woman paused. “That’s true for people, too.” She wiped her hands down the sides of her jeans before extending her right hand. “I’m Laura Trent.”

  I gulped. Laura Trent was Vulf’s mother’s name. I was face-to-face with his mom! I clasped her hand firmly, feeling the answering strength in her grip. “Jaya Romanov.”

  “I thought you were!” Laura released my hand, but only to pull me into an enthusiastic hug. With her sudden grin, she looked very much like her daughter, Edith, whom I’d met aboard a pirate starship. They were both blonde women of average height with powerful builds. I was taller, but they would knock me over in a second in a physical fight. Unless I was sneaky.

  Just at the moment I was out of breath again, but for a good reason. There was no doubting Laura’s delight at my visit.

  She squeezed me a final time, then released me. “But how did you get here?” She looked around for a vehicle.

  “I portalled in. I’m sorry I didn’t give you any notice.”

  In an instant, Laura changed from happy, prospective mother-in-law to a soldier on guard. She scanned the countryside, assessing it for threats. “Trouble?”

  “Not for you and yours,” I hastened to reassure her. “They won’t trace me—”

  “You are part of me and mine. You’re family, Jaya. Vulf’s mate. Now, what do you need? He’ll want to hear from you. He’s in the city at the moment.” She opened the gate.

  I shook myself out of the momentary stupor resulting from being so emphatically claimed. “There’s no immediate threat. I would like to talk with Vulf. Will he be returning here?” From his recorded messages I knew he split his time between his parents’ homestead and his starship, docked high above the planet Corsairs.

  “He will if you message him.” Laura shot me an amused look as she wrangled the goat into a wire-fenced yard.

  “I think my communicator has been hacked, so I disposed of it.” I’d tossed it into my pocket dimension. Nothing and no one could trace it in the pocket dimension, and maybe one day I’d be able to either oust the spyware on it or, at a minimum, clean-copy my contacts list. If the pocket dimension didn’t eat it.

  “You can borrow mine. It’s secure. As pirates, we take that sort of thing seriously. The last thing we need are nosy governments and competitors eavesdropping.” Ignoring the goat’s protesting bleats, Laura closed the gate to its yard, rattled it once to check it was secure, then walked with me up to the house. Daffodils and jonquils lined the path. The porch sat five steps high and a row of roses lined up against it, their new leaves holding a reddish tinge. The thorns were mostly hidden.

  I wiped my feet on the straw mat that had “welcome” burned into it, before following Laura’s example and entering the house with my boots on.

  The red front door opened into a long room that appeared to run the width of the house, and it was a wide house. The ceiling was high and painted white between exposed wooden beams. I couldn’t identify the golden-toned timber, but it also served as flooring. A darker wood, likely oak, had been used to make the vast table to my left and the ten chairs that surrounded it. To my right, comfortable sofas and armchairs for lounging around in were placed in two groups. The first faced a central fireplace, logs laid ready for ignition. The second grouping focused on a viewscreen. Curtains in a storm cloud blue color with a weave of lighter shades framed the tall windows along the front and sides.

  “One guaranteed secure communicator.” Laura collected the gadget from the mantelpiece, unlocked it with a fingerprint scan and voice command, and threw it to me. “I’ll be in the kitchen.” She pushed through a doorway to the back of the house, presumably to the kitchen.

  I selected Vulf’s name from the front screen list of contacts. I could message him or call him. No contest!

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Hearing his voice made my knees wobbly. I leaned against the dining table. “Actually, it’s Jaya. Hi, Vulf.”

  “Jaya.” Emotion deepened his already low voice.

  I heard a note of yearning to rival how I felt. “I missed you.”

  “Stargirl.” His pet name for me said everything. “But what happened that you’re using Mom’s communicator?”

  “I’m okay. I portalled here, to your parents’ homestead, on an impulse, and I didn’t want anyone tracking me via my communicator. So Laura lent me hers to call you.”

  He saw through my evasive response to the urgency of what I’d done. “I’ll be home in an hour.”

  “What is it?” Another deep male voice came distantly through the communicator.

  Vulf spoke quietly, obviously answering the man. “Jaya’s with Mom at the homestead.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Is that your dad?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We’re at the Conclave. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I was now. In fact, safe on Corsairs and having heard Vulf’s voice, the urgency that had driven me into fleeing San Juan felt exaggerated. “I panicked.”

  “About what? You don’t panic. Who threatened you?” His tone promised dire things for those responsible.

  “Can we talk about it when you get here? You need to concentrate on driving.” People on Corsairs used electric vehicles on their roads, and took their more leisurely journeys—or cargo loads—via waterways. Vulf would be driving back from the city.

  “Dad’s driving. It’s his car.”

  Just talking with Vulf was making me stronger, more myself. I walked to the window and looked out. The goat was on its hind legs, trying to chew open the gate latch. “I’d prefer to talk in person. It’s not urgent, Vulf. Honestly. And there’s no threat to your family.”

  “You are family,” Vulf said.

  “Damn right.” That was the distant voice of his dad, Thor Trent.

  “All right,” Vulf conceded. “We’ll talk when I get home. I’ll comm Ahab that you’re here. I have a spare communicator onboard the Orion. He’ll set it up for you.”

  “Thanks, Vulf.” I wasn’t sure if his dad could hear my side of the conversation. I decided it didn’t matter. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Stargirl.”

  We disconnected and I went in search of Laura. “Vulf and Thor will be here in an hour.”

  “Thor will get another speeding ticket.” She sounded resigned. Then she grinned at me. “He’ll argue with the traffic wardens’ office later and will probably get it retracted on the grounds that he was hurrying home to meet his son’s new mate, just arrived. Mates are important to shifters,” she added hesitantly, as if unsure about reminding me of the family’s shifter status.

  The process of getting to know one another and finding common ground was not an easy one. Would it have helped if Vulf was present for my first meeting with his mother or would he have made things even more complicated? I was wary and hopeful and aware that Laura was part of my life, now. We had decades of family gatherings before us…

  I smiled. I’d never had a family. “My father is a shifter. I don’t know who he is, but Vulf said there’s a database I could consult.” Laura began nodding. “Only it would tell my father before it told me about our blood tie.”

  “We’ll hack it for you,” Laura said, immediately contradicting her earlier assertion that communications on Corsairs were secure. But perhaps databases were fair game? The unwritten rules of a buccaneering society weren’t clear to me.

  “I think I’ll follow protocol,” I said. “I’ve had time on San Juan to think about it. Whoever my father is, it won’t matter to me, and I think Vulf will be okay with it. But for my father…learning about my existence could disrupt his current life. I need to know who he is, but I’ll leave it to him as to whether he acknowledges me.”

  “He’ll want you, Jaya. Children are everything to shifters.” She handed me a mug of coffee. “I have cake? Cookies?”

  “Just the coffee is fi
ne. It smells good.” I took a sip. “Vulf had this blend on the Orion.”

  Laura smiled. “A family favorite. A second cousin has a coffee plantation on the Far Isles. Let’s sit on the porch. We can watch the world go by.”

  I’d been so focused on Laura that I hadn’t looked out the windows. The barn and other outbuildings behind the house were arranged to allow a clear view from the house down to a wide river. On it, a barge progressed at a stately pace, unidentified barrels stacked high and lashed in place. A small boat nipped around it, speeding upstream.

  “Travelling by boat is valued on Corsairs,” she said. “People often dock for an hour or so to have a chat, but I’ll lower the flag. No flag tells people the family wants privacy. We won’t be bothered.”

  We sat on rockers on the back porch. Hanging baskets lined the railing, sturdy seedlings promising a floral show in a few weeks. A gray and white cat prowled around a corner of the barn, saw Laura and stalked toward us, leaping onto her lap. “Smoke will warm up to you,” she said. “Then he’ll jump onto your knee and shed fur.” She laughed as she dusted fur from her fingers after stroking the cat. “About your heritage…”

  “You won’t offend me,” I said when she hesitated.

  “It’s not that. Vulf might have told you, or he might want to be the one to tell you, but the fact that you think your father might not acknowledge you makes me think you don’t know, and you should.” After that confusing, tangled sentence Laura tsked at herself. She stopped the slight rocking motion of her chair. The cat leapt down, sitting in a patch of sunlight to groom itself. “The Conclave is Corsairs government. It also rules on the actions of pirate fleets in space. The clan leaders—there are eight of them—are supplemented by five directly elected representatives. Together, they form the ruling government, and in turn, are supported by an army of experts, officials and self-important blowhards. Even a pirate planet can’t escape the curse that is bureaucracy.”

  I’d had an overload of government today. I nodded that I understood and for Laura to continue.